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CIO leadership required in new world of connected product development

This is the time for the CIO to impact the return on product development investments, corporate growth, and profitability.

Overview

Substantial sums of money are involved with product development. This is the life blood of most companies, and to have successful and efficient processes takes substantial resources.

Product development, regardless of industry, has traditionally been a process area isolated from the CIO's world. Only in the final stage of a new product's launch is the CIO "connected" to the enterprise's systems (and ecosystem) to enable sales, fulfillment and service activities. This late connection has rendered the CIO a passive participant in most product development processes.

Over the last few years, however, a new generation of products requires a greater reliance on enterprise systems to fully function. To improve time-to-market, profitability and quality of new products, tighter integration is needed. The CIO is becoming a crucial and active participant in product development success.

"In fact, among the 2,000 largest global public companies, product development spending exceeds $700 billion, according to Accenture research and analysis."

THREE MACRO TRENDS

There are three trends affecting how CIOs can create value in the product development process. To capitalize on these trends, CIOs need to understand the evolving product and enterprise IT convergence and how to leverage that convergence effectively​.

TREND ONE

Increasing product connectivity with the ecosystem/enterprise systems

Connected products provide enhanced value to their users but come with a cost to enterprise integrations and operations. A product's new capabilities in reporting, configuration monitoring, and feature upgrades requires heightened levels of support, security, operability and performance from the CIO's IT back-office enterprise systems.

TREND TWO

Increasing reliance on software to deliver product features

Over the last decade, the role of software in determining a product's features has dramatically increased, and this will continue. The demand for software talent in product development is also growing. Even companies with traditional physical products have seen their need for software engineering swell from a small percent to half of their product engineering team.

TREND THREE

Connected, software-driven products are fueling growth in the Everything-as-a-Service and Internet of Things (IoT) markets. These products have characteristics that would have been hard to imagine only a few years ago.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Designing, developing, launching and sustaining software-driven connected products requires substantial adjustments to product development and enterprise processes as well as systems and data management. This necessitates a change in the CIO's role to effectively support product engineering teams developing these products.

CIOs can best lead their organizations to capitalize on the three trends by:

Engaging with product development teams from concept through deployment, avoiding a last-minute "connection" event during a product's deployment;

Taking a leadership role in architecting and delivering secure, scalable and operable back-office systems that support Everything-as-a-Service models and IoT products.

This is the time for the CIO to step up and become a key member of the product development process contributing directly and impacting the return on product development investments, corporate growth, and profitability.

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